Salesforce Buys Marketing Data Management Start-Up Krux

Salesforce said it has agreed to buy Krux, a San Francisco start-up that manages marketing data, for about $700 million (£550m), the latest of a string of acquisitions over the past year.

Krux, founded in 2010, provides a data management platform that aims to bring together information captured across different platforms and devices and improve engagement with users and prospective customers.

Audience targeting

The technology is used by companies including ABInBev, BBC, ConAgra Foods, L’Oreal, Jet Blue Airways and Kellogg’s.

Krux had already worked with Salesforce for some time as a partner, said chief executive Tom Chavez.

“Krux will extend the Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s audience segmentation and targeting capabilities to power consumer marketing with even more precision, at scale,” he said in a statement.

The technology will also feed data to Salesforce’s artificial intelligence platform, Einstein, Chavez said.

$4bn spending spree

Salesforce said in a regulatory filing it would pay $340m in cash for the acquisition, with the remainder in common stock, after which the start-up is to become a wholly owned subsidiary.

The company has spent about $4bn over the past 12 months on acquisitions including cloud e-commerce provider Demandware, collaboration technology maker Quip and business analytics provider BeyondCore.

Salesforce also attempted to acquire LinkedIn for about $26bn but was beaten by Microsoft, which paid $26.2bn for the business social network in June.

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